All posts tagged ‘J. R. R. Tolkien’

Visual timeline of The One Ring, by Emil Johansson. Click on the image to see the full version on the original site.

A fantastically-visualized timeline of the “life” of The One Ring (to rule them all) from J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories. The graphic covers both time, geography, and possession in a gorgeous layout. Well done!

This is a spoiler filled commentary meant for those who have seen the film or don’t mind spoilers.

Let’s get this out of the way right at the start. The Galadriel/Gandalf touch the hair thing worked. In fact, all of the touching between the two of them worked very well. I especially liked the contrast between the manicured and perfect hands of the “Lady of Light” and the scarred, calloused, dirty hands of the suffering servant Gandalf. So to all the members of the “Peter Jackson is Infallible” fan club and the entire nation of Middle Ear… I mean New Zealand, who last January decided that I was nothing but a horse’s derriere, mea cul…

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is perhaps the most expected journey audiences will go on this year.

We’ve all been madly waiting to venture back to Middle-earth — back to Peter Jackson’s cinematic version of Tolkien’s world. The anticipation, and the hype machine that has been driving that anticipation, has been nearly unbearable.

So here we are, nine years after our last glimpse of the Shire, Rivendell, and the Misty Mountains, all last seen in 2003′s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. That film brought home a dragon’s horde of golden statuettes — perhaps for no better reason than the Academy being impressed by Mr. Jackson’s hubris, getting non-geek audiences to embrace an old-fashioned high fantasy epic, and making gads of money. Or, perhaps, Oscar Inc. was astonished at how a small nation of Kiwis churned out a multi-billion dollar franchise with only gum, wire, pluck and resourcefulness, plus a few swordsmiths and chain mail makers and about 7,000 latex hobbit feet.

So what does this return trip to Middle-earth feel and look like? How does Jackson’s plan for not one, not two, but three Hobbit movies, stretching and morphing Tolkien’s slim and slight 1937 kid’s book into a trilogy, sit with fans, as well as audiences not familiar with the book? Or might we all be a little jaded and/or spoiled for this next trilogy?

When I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis last week, I was still in the midst of a nasty cold. So it seemed appropriate to be speaking with the very incarnation of Gollum just as my own voice was sounding a bit Gollum-y. Not that I tried to challenge Serkis to a Gollum-off. He would have beat me hands down. Phlegm down, too.

Serkis is now recognized as an innovating pioneer of performance capture acting. Once called merely “motion capture,” the process on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is now a more sophisticated technique than what was used on The Lord of the Rings a decade ago.

For the Rings trilogy, which was shot on film, Serkis acted his scenes on a separate sound stage and his digital performance was merged with the live action actors in post-production. With Weta Digital’s more robust “performance capture” system used in The Hobbit, Serkis (as Gollum) and Martin Freeman (as Bilbo) performed the “Riddles in the Dark” scene from beginning to end on the same set. Peter Jackson directed both two live actors, and Serkis’s slinky movements were recorded by his special suit’s sensors. Later, a digital character replaced Serkis, and animators enhanced and tweaked the performance data. But much of Gollum’s movements were, in fact, based on Serkis’s entire performance. Continue Reading “Hobbit Week: A Conversation With Andy Serkis, Creator of Gollum” »

“They have taken the bridge and the second hall. We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes, drums… drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We can not get out… they are coming.”

In my efforts to slowly but surely brainwash my nephew into being a geek, I’ve gradually been introducing him to Tolkien.

First, I gave him a copy of The Hobbit. Then I let him watch the first of the Lord of the Rings movies. I even agreed to watch with him the Rankin-Bass cartoon of The Hobbit. (It’s not as bad as I remembered. Peter Jackson could learn a thing or two about brevity from that adaptation.)

Then, for his latest birthday, his 10th, after clearing it with his parents, I went deep into the mines. I made him search for his presents, via a riddle game/scavenger hunt inspired by Bilbo and Gollum. My nephew had to solve one clue, which led him to the next clue, which led him to the next, which finally led him to his birthday prize: a fancy, illustrated hardcover edition of The Hobbit, and a Lego Mines of Moria set. A geek he is becoming. Continue Reading “Speak ‘Friend’ and Eat It: Making a Lord of the Rings Mines of Moria Birthday Cake” »

By now, I will guess that most of our audience has heard about the lawsuit that the Tolkien estate filed against Warner Brothers for its marketing of Lord of the Rings products. If you haven’t heard, The Hollywood Reporter has a pretty good summary of the case as well as a link to the court filing. I think fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings owe it to themselves to take a look. Don’t be intimidated; the salient bits of the filing itself are short and written in almost plain English. Continue Reading “The Tolkien Estate Sues to Protect Their Precious” »

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is due out in theaters in a month, launching Peter Jackson’s vision of the opening bars of the tale of the titular hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. It seems like an excellent time then to take a look at the other end of Bilbo’s long trip as embodied in Bilbo’s Last Song.

This short poem is a bit that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote as an epilogue to The Lord of the Rings in the voice of Bilbo, who supposedly sang it in the Grey Havens as he prepared to leave Middle-earth behind. It was never included in the text of Tolkien’s saga, though. His secretary Joy Hill discovered it in his library in 1968, and he gave it to her as a gift.

After Tolkien’s death in 1973, Hill showed the poem to Donald Swann, who had already set a good deal of Tolkien’s Middle-earth songs to actual music in his The Road Goes Ever On book of sheet music. He wrote new music for the poem and included it in his book’s second edition. Continue Reading “Bilbo’s Last Song, Revised” »

I’m reading The Hobbit to my kids, because in a month’s time, it will be a completely different experience. Although it’ll be a while before they can watch the film, the pictures in my own mind, conjured up from Tolkien’s phrases, will be subsumed by Peter Jackson’s vision. Before long, in our imaginations, all dwarves will be of the absurdly coiffured variety.

Not that I begrudge Sir Peter the most maddening hairdos since Padme gave Leia’s buns a run for their money – one of the challenges of the novel is differentiating the thirteen dwarves from each other, and even from still shots it’s possible to see how Jackson has imbued each with their own peculiar characteristics. Because, certainly, the novel is not easy to read to a four- and a six-year-old – as it was written in the thirties, it does contain the occasional archaic phrase that modern children might struggle to understand. It’s necessary to read it in an ebullient manner just to hold their attention.

That said, my children seem to be really enjoying it. At least, they don’t want me to stop when it’s bed time (though that may be because of their reluctance to go to sleep). They like the names of the dwarves, especially, or moments such as the instance where the trolls call each other ‘boobies.’ They liked counting the dwarves as they arrived. They like the promise of elves, goblins and dragons to come. It’s worth investing in an illustrated edition, though, because punctuating the prose with pictures seems to help keep a young audience interested. You could argue that Alan Lee‘s interpretation is likely to influence the reader’s imagination as surely as Peter Jackson’s (especially as he is also one of the concept artists working on the movie), but his beautiful paintings are so dreamlike that they serve to guide rather than dictate.

For me, the imminent release of the movie has encouraged a return to the original texts of The Lord of the Rings, novels I fell in love with as a teenager but haven’t picked up for decades. While I adored Jackson’s wondrous films, I’m enjoying reacquainting myself with Tolkien’s original words. I’m discovering what a wonderful nature writer the Professor was, reminiscent of the poet Edward Thomas, and in his descriptions of Hobbits and the Shire, particularly Tom Bombadil’s sanctuary, I’m finding solace in this crazy, busy, demanding world. As the world gets more complex, as Noble Smith has said in articles on this site, there’s much to be said for a life of simple pleasures – friendship, ale, hearty food and long walks. If my sons only take one phrase from The Hobbit, I hope it’s this line of Thorin’s:

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”